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Building on your Mental Wellbeing

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and the team behind De-Stress Fest at the Royal Horticultural Halls and Stress Matters is asking you to commit to 30 minutes per day on improving your wellbeing. Five minutes of that will be reading this blog, then the other 25 mins is putting at least one of our tips into practice!

Anyone that has done a mental health awareness course will have heard about their stress container. The idea is that we each have a container that our stressors get poured into everyday and when it overflows, we start to experience our symptoms of stress. To stop it overflowing, we create a tap at the bottom where we can release the pressure and this tap is made up of our coping strategies – the things we do that make us feel good.

For us to feel truly well, we incorporate elements from the four pillars of wellbeing – mental, physical, emotional and spiritual and so over the next four days, we will be giving you insights into some techniques you can use to improve your coping strategy tap.

Tip 1 – Identify the things causing you stress

Now it might be easy here to just say work or Covid-19 or money. But try and think about exactly what it is that is causing you stress, name it specifically.

If it’s Covid-19 for example, is it that you are worried for your health, health of a family member, the fact that you don’t know what will happen with your job? Being explicit with what it is that is causing us stress will bring us one step closer to being able to overcome the stress. Use the below to help you understand what’s causing you stress.

Tip 2 – Live in the moment

This is an anxiety inducing time and that means we might find ourselves worrying about the future more than normal. Ask yourself is everything ok right now? To quickly rebalance. Our minds can get stuck in a loop replaying the same unhelpful thoughts over and over again. When we look more closely at it, we see that we’re actually ok and the future, when we get there, is just another now moment. Join A.Life.More.Mindful on a Thursday evening for their free session on mindset. Therapist Amanda Weller is also running free online sessions every Tuesday at 8pm, join her here.

Tip 3 - Build your emotional literacy

This is a fancy way of suggesting that you spend time understanding and articulating how you feel. We often find the word fine pops out of our mouth when someone asks how we are doing but actually we are probably not fine, we probably have 20 other emotions and feelings in that moment. We need to learn to say how we are feeling, this will help us feel heard and will help the other person understand. So ask yourself ‘how are you doing?’ and give yourself plenty of time to find the words and answer honestly. Check out the Stress Matters Instagram account for daily stories on different emotions that you might be experiencing.

Tip 4 – Spend time with nature

With the relaxed rules around how much time we can now spend outside, use this as an opportunity to create a sense of achievement in nature. We can all grow something, whether you have a garden or a pot on a windowsill, whether it’s herbs, salad leaves or tomatoes which all grow quickly and will keep growing as you pick them, the Royal Horticultural Society has plenty of advice for beginners. Connecting with nature in such a practical way brings a sense of calm and clarity. Nurseries and RHS Plant shops are now opening up for visitors or you can order online from specialists around the country to create your own nature haven at home.

Tip 5 – Form some good habits

Another way you could spend those 25 minutes is doing a habit review. What do you do everyday and in what order? Which of these are good habits and which are bad habits? Our old lives are behind us and the opportunity we have now is to build on those good things we did and remove some of those negative things to have a good set of habits. You might swap out your 3pm trip to the snack cupboard with a 3pm stretch or you squat whilst you’re waiting for your cuppa to brew. There are so many small pockets of time in the day that we can build in good habits, we just need to spend a little time identifying them. To learn more about habits, check out James Clear’s book called Atomic Habits.

Mental Health is one of the 4 pillars that make up our overall wellbeing. For a free wellbeing insights report on your business, contact Laura Capell-Abra at Stress Matters.

Need an industry Buddy to talk to? The Buddies Matter scheme created by Stress Matters will match you up with a peer in the industry who you can talk to on a regular basis. All you need to do is fill out the form and you’ll be matched with a like-minded person who’s happy to listen.

Need to talk to someone about your mental health? The Events and Hospitality industry support line created by Stress Matters is here to help. A qualified Mental Health First Aider is on hand from 8am – 8pm Monday to Friday. Call 07841 362 111 and feel free to share this number with your peers, you never know when they might need it.